in Athens at 10:30 PM, I learned that the flight to Alexandria had been postponed until 2:30 AM. If we had no further delays, I’d reach my hotel at daybreak; not the most propitious start, but good practice for the vagaries of North Africa.
My fellow passengers all appeared to be Egyptians, returning from Europe with curios and souvenirs in string bags and cardboard boxes. Like me, they seemed frazzled and exhausted as they shuffled through the gauntlet of metal detectors, passport controls and X-ray machines, juggling hand luggage, boarding cards, tickets, loose change and shoes. The security guards in Athens were an officious bunch, testy to a man and contemptuous of the Egyptians, whom they frisked and interrogated, shoved and assaulted with sword-length electronic wands.
I’ll concede that in the squinty eyes of a prejudiced airport profiler, this might look like a planeload of terrorists. Most men were turbaned and bearded, their foreheads darkened by zebibahs, or prayer bumps, from pressing their brows to the ground five times a day. The guards treated the women as if their ample burnooses and veils were designed to conceal a machine gun or belt of Semtex. While it was true that the passengers displayed a bewilderment that might have been mistaken for truculence, and they had names that must have set the computerized watch list shrilling, the guards overdid it with their rough hands and sneering disdain.
Then it was my turn to be patted down, chided for not having removed my watch and grilled about my destination. As the conveyor belt trundled my carry-on through the X-ray machine, a guard ordered me to open the bag and empty every zippered compartment. No point in protesting that I had already done this three times today. I showed him my transparent sack of liquid containers, then waited while he pawed through my shaving kit.
“What’s this?” he demanded in English.
“A nail clipper.”
He fingered the tip of the tiny file and said, “Knife.”
He was about to chuck it into the discard bin when I stopped him and snapped off the file. “Okay?” I asked.
His brow furrowed in disappointment. He dropped the nail clipper into my shaving kit, resumed pawing, then broke into a smile and again said, “Knife.” Now he held up a pair of scissors with plastic handles and flimsy blades less than an inch long. I had bought them expressly because they met international security standards. They had passed screenings in the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. They had passed Italian security in Rome just hours ago. But the man insisted they violated European Union regulations and had to be confiscated.
Was it the late hour? The long flights and the delay? The abuse I had watched him heap on the Egyptians? I knew I should have shrugged and let the man have his bumptious way. But I also knew I was right and he was wrong. And I imagined that dozens of cowed passengers were watching and waiting to see whether petty tyranny or the rule of law would prevail.
“I’d like to speak to a supervisor,” I said.
The supervisor was a schoolmarmish lady with a name tag on her bosom and a bun in her hair. She stood by her man, supporting him 110 percent. While she conceded that the scissors didn’t violate EU regulations, she maintained that Athens airport followed a stricter code. I was free to take it or leave it. That is, take my scissors and leave the airport. Or leave my scissors and take the plane to Alexandria. I left the scissors, but before moving on, I leaned close, scribbling her name and employee number on my ticket.
As I proceeded down the chute that funneled us onto the plane, somebody shouted, “Meester, meester, one minute.”
It was the supervisor, her heels hammering the metal floor. For an instant I thought she meant to apologize and give me back my scissors. Then I noticed a guard at her side, armed with a rifle.
“I need your name and passport number,” she said.
“Why?”
“When there’s an incident, we take the passenger’s name.”
“What incident?”
“The argument about the scissors. You took my name. Now I take yours.”
“There was no argument. No incident.” Abjectly, I surrendered my passport. “What does this mean? I’ll be on a no-fly list?”
“That’s not my decision. I just keep the records.” She jabbed the passport back into my hand and clattered up the chute in her high heels.
After that, I’d like to say that my flight to Alexandria went smoothly. But even in the absence of air turbulence, I had a bumpy ride. I made the mistake of reading the Lonely Planet guide to Egypt, and it began with a discouraging general assessment of the national situation. After twenty-five years of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, the guidebook declared, “Egypt is in a pretty bad state. Unemployment is rife (some analysts put it as high as 25 percent, the government bandies around the figure of 9.9 percent), the economy is of the basket-case variety and terrorist attacks are starting to occur with worrying regularity.”
As for Mubarak’s “lousy human rights record,” Lonely Planet noted that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “excoriate Egypt year after year, asserting that the media and judiciary are allowed no real independence and that police regularly abuse their legislative right to unlimited powers of search and arrest ... Egyptian police regularly torture and ill-treat prisoners in detention ... and scores of members of Islamist opposition groups are regularly imprisoned without charge or trial.”
The guidebook added that Mubarak, in defense of his regime, had pointed out that the United States held hundreds of Islamic detainees at Guantanamo and at secret prisons or black sites in compliant countries around the world. While not acknowledging that his country was one of those black sites and that his security forces were alleged to have tortured suspected terrorists at the behest of the Americans, Mubarak said, “We were right from the beginning in using all means, including military tribunals, to combat terrorism.”
Mubarak demanded whether Egyptians would prefer that their “moderate democracy” (sic on both scores) go the way of Lebanon, Gaza or, God forbid, Algeria. In this region, Algeria was everybody’s bogeyman.
Under U.S. pressure to open up the political process, Mubarak allowed a slightly fairer election in 2005. But when eighty-eight members of the Muslim Brotherhood won seats in Parliament, America ratcheted back its rhetoric about the virtues of democracy. As critics remarked, the United States tended to lose interest in free elections when the “wrong” candidates prevailed.
Switching from the Lonely Planet to that day’s New York Times, I read an article headlined “Day of Angry Protests Stuns Egypt.” It described a country in turmoil—abandoned roads, shuttered businesses and brigades of riot police mobilized to stamp out a nationwide strike. Many Egyptians had stayed away from work and school to protest the rising price of bread and basic foodstuffs. Hardly limited to the working class, this movement had spread to doctors, lawyers, journalists. According to reports, the protests had nothing to do with religious fanaticism or regime change. Egyptians didn’t demand democracy or human rights. They had had little experience of either. They were simply desperate for economic survival in a society where professionals with twenty years of experience earned 80 U.S. dollars a month.
My plane smacked down at 4 AM, and as it taxied at high speed across the runway, passengers bounded to their feet and fumbled their belongings from the overhead racks. Nothing the flight attendant or the pilot said could persuade them to sit down and buckle up. It was something I would witness again and again-the indomitable spirit of Egyptians,
